Wine Gifts for the Cellar

Our top rated selections for gifting

Red Burgundy is known as a minefield. The effects of the growing season can have a perversely disparate effect on vineyards that lay mere paces from one another. The truly great vineyards are ones that can produce spectacular wines in almost any vintage, and those are the vineyards the connoisseurs follow. Les Boudots in Nuits St. Georges is one of the vineyards.

As is the case with most of the great vineyards of Burgundy, the fruit from Les Boudot is shared by a handful of producers. Two of the very finest producers craft exceptional bottlings from this small plot and sell them of hundreds of dollars a bottle, the remaining producers are all crowded in at close to $100 a bottle. Among these, Jean Grivot's is a standout. The fruit from these old vines yields a rich, structured Burgundy, full of black fruit, mineral scents and an edge of meatiness that needs just a few years to fully blossom.

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Comments

I live in Penticton, British Columbia, Canada. I subscribe to you daily reviews and tips on wines. I have even taken you up on some of your "recommendations" on nice whites and reds. I have been reading your e-mail for about a year now and I have not seen any "recommendation" on any Canadian wine, especially from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, which is renowned for it's "best wines" in the world. We are compared to a mini Napa Valley and have fantastic wines, tourists come from all over the world to taste some of the wine here in the Okanagan Valley.
No, I am not a wine owner, nor have anything to do with the vineyards here, I just enjoy a nice bottle of wine.

Although I can't answer your question on behalf of Snooth, I can point out a coupe of obvious reasons why you don’t see these wines on Snooth. But first let me say that I have tasted some of the Okanagan Valley wines you wrote about and that I was surprised by the high quality and excellence of the fruit and winemaking. Everyone in America knows Canada for its Ice Wines, not delicious reds. I tasted these wines in Bordeaux, of all places, this past summer and had never known about them until then.

Canada is going to have to do better with their efforts to get the attention of Americans and that means campaigning endlessly. It’s a huge, cluttered, virtual sea of wine out there as you know and cutting through, whether it’s for shelf space at retail, or just consciousness in someone’s head, is a major undertaking. The commitment has to be on the part of the wine estate or wine region and it takes major money to accomplish anything significant.

Secondly, distribution needs to happen and that’s very difficult these days but without it, all marketing efforts will fail if the consumer can’t find the wine on every shelf, or at least many shelves. Distributors are the key to this but they’re not going to take on another wine estate without the resources and commitment to see it through. The third option to get attention in the wine world is to let it grow organically, no pun intended, by word of mouth but this can be a very long process.

I don’t think that Snooth or anyone else is intentionally shunning Canadian wines but just that there is not a demand for it and therefore it’s below many people’s radar. I tasted the Osoyoos Larose (Le Grand Vin - Red Wine) 2001 and 2005 and for under $50 per bottle, I think this Bordeaux blend is a terrific value.

to Kristin Maier.
...notwithstanding, most of the wine produced in BC is consumed in BC. Very little of it gets to any other parts of Canada nevermind the US or the rest of the world. So it's almost pointless that Snooth or anyone else pay any attention because the best BC wines cannot even be gotten within BC except at the winery or at a restaurant - certainly not at any of the BC liquor stores.
I believe its a known fact that BC and Oregon are roughly equivalent in the amount of wine produced. Here probably 70-80% is consumed within BC, in Oregon its the other way around.
Speaking as a BC resident, like yourself, I'm not complaining about the lack of hoopla.....more for me!

Your insight is very interesting. It is a very reasonable explanation why those of us outside of BC have no or little knowledge of wines from your area. However, please be assured that we do want ot learn about them even if we don't get to experience them. Presumably, we can experience them in visits, or by creating demand for some entrepreneur to exploit,